Use FreeNAS as a PXE boot Server

[EarlIV]

hey guys and gals

I'm new on the freenas train and i would like to know if I can use freenas as a PXE boot and if so what plugins and or programs i might need to help me do this.

 

[sretalla]

I'm not clear from your question if you want to boot other systems from the FreeNAS server or to boot the FreeNAS server itself from PxE.

I'll make a few points assuming you want to boot other systems from FreeNAS.

You could possibly get to something if you first:

Understand Jails

Master network assignment in FreeBSD and jails (since what you want to do from inside a jail will need multiple NICs and this is not simple).

Understand which OS you want to boot (the article I link below seems to suggest cross-OS booting isn't a good thing).

Then:

Have a look at this article and see if you're up for the challenge of marrying it with the concept of jails.

Best of luck with it.

 

[Chris Moore]

hey guys and gals

I'm new on the freenas train and i would like to know if I can use freenas as a PXE boot and if so what plugins and or programs i might need to help me do this.

It seems to me that you want to boot other systems from a boot image hosted on the FreeNAS server.
This question is a little ambiguous. Can you clarify?


Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[kdragon75]

Yeah FreeNAS has the tftp service baked in. You just need to place your files there and set your DHCP option 66 to point to the FreeNAS file. I use this with vSphere to auto deploy dozens of hosts in seconds! in fact, I can build and boot a simple lab cluster in under 15 minutes.

 

[EarlIV]

thats what im wanting to do is boot a PXE server from freenas so i can deploy images to systems that need it

 

[kdragon75]

What kind of system images? What management software are you using? If your just looking to boot ISOs over the network and not run an Ubuntu MaaS environment, you may look into https://ipxe.org/. There is not a real "pxe server" it is a collection of services and standards that work together.

 

[kdragon75]

If you working with windows, there is a pxe boot service but that's geared toward windows. Its all part of WDS.

 

[EarlIV]

im just needing something to deploy images to Machines, since i have all the master disk and dont want to use them everytime i need to install an os.

 

[kdragon75]

im just needing something to deploy images to Machines, since i have all the master disk and don't want to use them everytime i need to install an os.

Well that's a lot more specific!

 

[Bob-PTi]

I want to boot a intel machine from my FreeNAS. I would like to boot it running Windows 10. I use to run a lot of SUNs that did this but not sure how to do it with FreeNAS. Can;t find the program that I need to get this started? Any help?